Sure, it can withstand a nuclear war, and we've got some records, but how much of our beloved Internet is a database error away from being lost?
The That fragile thing we call the Internet article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
Reading Robin Wauter's tweet and the heart-wrenching paragraph that is all that's left of one man's four years of blogging, it made me think again how little time most of us devote to backing things up.
How would you feel if you lost all your blog posts?
So here's what I propose: an annual Backup Your Blog Day. Maybe on April 1st ('cos only fools don't back up!) Or... (date suggestions?)
There's apparently already a monthly 13th Blog Backup Day. (And, ideally, you'd be doing automated backups every day or week but we don't live in an ideal world so I'll take pragmatic over ideal any day!)
We need twitter avatar badges and blog chicklets. Who's up for designing them? And it would rock to have a Wordpress plugin that reminds you to make a manual backup of your blog.
Thoughts?
The That fragile thing we call the Internet article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
Having just got a TimeCapsule, I’m in a backup mood! Think it’s a great idea!
The problem isn’t backups – it’s knowing whether your backups are useful (which is what happened with Coolz0r: they weren’t). So I’d recommend (assuming you for some reason cannot put in place something more frequent) backing up your blog (and any other bits of your website) once a month, and *at least once a year* rebuilding them onto another site. (These days that other site could quite happily just be running on your laptop.) It demonstrates that you actually have all the useful ducks lined up properly.
You also have to be able to notice within the schedule of your backup cycle when something has gone wrong; with a large site and very old data, this is harder than it sounds. Keeping periodic backups forever avoids this problem (although it might still be a huge amount of work to recover to the last known good state if only part of your site gets corrupted).
(Better yet is to do say db dumps and incremental backups every day, full backups every month, and test restore some stuff at random out of everything you back up on a regular schedule. I’ll admit that last bit is something I’m not strictly doing…)
I use Movable Type, which means I have static files, but I also once a month back up the whole of the database as a sql file and I do I “export” text back up of my posts. I am pretty covered.
smiles, jen ;o)